Epix
I feel kind of duped after this week’s episode, or maybe a sense of deja vu as it was pretty much a repeat of the premiere episode with just a little more information added. It was all, again, about Manson arriving in California, his ability to target women using the methods he learned from the Dale Carnegie course he took in how to win friends and influence people, and getting them first to the movie ranch and then to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s home. All of this was covered in the first episode and simply rehashed in the third.
To fill the rest of the time, we did get an interesting history of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district at the end of the turbulent Sixties when the hippie movement was overtaking the city, as hundreds or thousands, of people took up residence in Golden Gate Park to protest the Vietnam War and to stick it to ‘the man’ by following Timothy Leary’s advice: ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’ One of the more surprising moments of the episode was seeing actor Peter Coyote (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial) talking about a group he was with at the time that went to the park and helped feed and clothe those who were rejecting the commercialism of society. But this movement in the park led to the rise of gurus, men usually who had a way with words and could entrance people with them.
This is what inspired Manson, and with his Carnegie background, he knew he could sway the right people just by studying their facial expressions and body language. He immediately latched on to Mary Brunner, a young woman who was obviously out of her element among the hippie culture, and he was able to talk his way into her apartment since he had nowhere else to stay. She believed they had a romantic relationship but she would come home from work and find him with other women and instead of tossing him out, she just accepted that she had to share him. With Brunner, he was able to recruit more young women and they eventually moved off the grid to the movie ranch, and Manson used the more attractive of the group to lure men in as well.
The drug culture at the time, particularly the use of LSD, was also instrumental in Manson’s efforts to recruit now acolytes to his group, among them the handsome, strapping young man Tex Watson. When traveling to California, he became interested in psychedelics and the music industry and met some os Manson’s women and he was quickly lured into ‘the family’. Probably one of the more disturbing elements of this is the comments by Dianne Lake. At 14, she was a member of a hippie commune with her parents but the people in charge were uncomfortable with a minor in their midst. So they, and she, agreed to move in with some other people they knew and she was quickly introduced to Manson, joined the family and admitted to their sexual interactions.
The episode covered again the residency at Dennis Wilson’s house and also revealed that Wilson recorded one of Manson’s songs, but rewriting some of it and taking full credit which did not make Manson happy. Manson sent Wilson a bullet in the mail and told him there were more where that came from, so Wilson is probably lucky that he didn’t incur the full wrath of the Manson family.
The last third of the episode veers off into a history lesson of racism in America, focusing mainly on the Watts riots of August 1965 that were a result of a traffic stop of an African American man that went horribly wrong, with reports of the white police officers seriously injuring a pregnant woman that escalated into the worst civil unrest in the city not seen until the Rodney King trial in 1992. In the first episode, a lot of this was also covered to the point of suggesting Manson was eager to use this as fodder for his own attempt at starting a race war. But then the episode ended with someone saying that was not true at all and left us hanging as to what Manson’s true intentions were. This episode, however, makes it blatantly clear that Manson did want to start a race war. So which is it? We have three more episodes to find out … unless we just get more rehasing.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
Share this post
